{"id":6135,"date":"2022-04-15T23:18:03","date_gmt":"2022-04-16T03:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=6135"},"modified":"2022-04-19T22:48:08","modified_gmt":"2022-04-20T02:48:08","slug":"building-from-the-bottom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/04\/building-from-the-bottom\/","title":{"rendered":"Building from the bottom"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>n the South, networks of communication run like honeysuckle roots through the region\u2019s radical underground. Activists along these subterranean lines spread news of mutual aid, of protest, of struggle. And as beloved and nourishing as anything else, the crafts of our cultural workers are sent through, too. Nutrients to a stressed, besieged body.<\/p>\n

Like honeysuckle roots, organizing in the South is a rhizomatic system. Between long, dormant stretches, here and there are nodes of activity. At times, renewed by these nutrients, new growth struggles indomitably up, as if through the red clay itself, and bursts into view.<\/p>\n

But, indeed, it is a struggle.<\/p>\n

In the South, workers have the worst conditions in a country already committed to stacking its deck against the working poor, against the oppressed, against people with disabilities. Last year, the U.S. affiliate of Oxfam released a report<\/a> titled, \u201cBest and Worst States to Work in America 2021.\u201d Its measures included wage policies, worker protections, and rights to organize.<\/p>\n

The Southern states are huddled at the bottom. South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi are ranked 48th, 49th, and 50th.<\/p>\n

And it gets worse. Oxfam\u2019s ranking includes Puerto Rico and Washington D.C., too, so the bottom-dwellers keep coming. Georgia is ranked 51st, and dead last at 52nd: North Carolina.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no coincidence that down here, poverty reigns. Beleaguered masses are unemployed or underemployed, uninsured or underinsured. Given these generational, vice-like poverty conditions and some of the most noticeable absences of social protections, it\u2019s not surprising that Black poverty is disproportionately high. Given those same conditions, and some of the most complete integration<\/a> of ICE and local law enforcement in the country, it\u2019s not surprising that Latinx poverty is disproportionately high, too.<\/p>\n

In this environment, this scorched earth, it is our lives, our work, our livelihoods that are ripped up to ensure pristineness for the fortunate few. In this environment\u2013in which the powerful toil not only to maintain our immiseration, but to silence any remembrance of our radical past\u2013it\u2019s our revolutionary politics of abolition, of liberation, of unshakeable solidarity, that are considered invasive.<\/p>\n

We are the honeysuckle vines ever emerging along the edges of Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia\u2013the home of The Masters. Contemporarily, we are cut down. Historically, we\u2019ve been sprayed back.<\/p>\n

But they must not fathom that our roots will always endure. And will ever rise up: There, and there.<\/p>\n

Increasingly charged with the radical passion of our cultural workers. Increasingly unmastered.<\/p>\n

\n

At the beginning of February, an email shot through one line in our networks. News that raced from one Southern campus workers\u2019 union to the next. Nutrients carried from node to node.<\/p>\n

The email was sent out by an organizer for the UE150, the North Carolina Public Service Workers Union. Its message was simple:<\/p>\n

Ready for this??<\/p>\n

Check out this video from a campus worker union member in United Campus Workers of Georgia (CWA).<\/p>\n

What followed the brief text was a YouTube link to a video for artist Linqua Franqa\u2019s song, \u201cWurk.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Very few viewers are ready.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a tremendously produced video for a song that injects extraordinary inspiration into those in struggle. It lays bare the conditions that so many workers face, in the South and beyond, as well as the resulting feelings that such conditions produce. Even its first lines shout out the simmering unionization movement among us,<\/p>\n

Communication Workers of America!<\/p>\n

United Campus Workers of Georgia 3265, bish!<\/p>\n

and it then builds with unshakeable energy and a precision of analysis.<\/p>\n

But no praise does it justice:<\/p>\n